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The data leak that appears to affect every single South African has just become a lot more harrowing.

Local developer Gerd Naschenweng and Troy Hunt have run an analysis of the data that made its way onto a public facing server and discovered that of the 60 million plus records, 12.4 million of those are minors.

As Naschenweng rightly points out the Department of Home Affairs (DHA) has agreements within in the financial sector for purposes of identity verification and fraud prevention. But children don’t really play in the financial sector, especially at three years old.

That means that the data of minors has no place in this leak and yet here we sit. It seems some tough questions to have to be answered such as why the data of children is being handed to private companies.

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Well,l the data was leaked, as you know so the first problem is why was it not secured (ID numbers, names, addresses, email addresses...).

The second problem is why that data included details of minors? The only entity with such information is Home Affairs. Now if what some suggest is true - that Home Affairs share their data with credit bureau's for checks - then the question is why do they not share a subset of the relevant data with these companies? Why are they providing them with a dump of all the info including those of children....

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Meh, I know too little about these kind of things to even being to speculate what can and cannot be done with said data, however I do feel like there must be systems in place to prevent anything malicious from happening with said leaked data.

I'm probably being naive, but at least I'm not worried about something that might happen.